This is one of a series of posts in self-promotion. You can read the first one here.

Let me first say that I have very mixed reactions regarding Fan Fiction.

If you are a writer and you are getting fanfic, that means something pretty good is going on. Not only do you have a reader community that loves the same things we love (which is what we all want as writers, to share the things we love.*), but you have them loving your world to the point that they invest their time and creative efforts into adding to it.

On the other hand, these creative types can potentially dilute the vision you have for your characters that you created. Some of the worst offenders were the Mary Sues who were so perfect and wonderful that everyone loved them no matter what. There seemed to also exist a rabid “slash fiction” version written by ill-brained fans who weren’t content with the characters as they were, but had to turn them into something they were not.** There’s even an open-world group (I won’t link them here and give them more traffic than they need) that thinks they should be able to run rough-shod legally over anyone else’s intellectual property because they’re too lazy to worldbuild on their own.

In some ways, I consider a lot of movies made from books to be fanfic. Essentially the scriptwriter and director botches the story elements, and I ask myself, “If they liked it enough to make a movie out of it, how can they change it so drastically? Why not just write a story of your own by plucking out the elements you like and rearranging them?” Of course that argument would only fall on deaf ears, because of course they “know better.” But I digress…

After all of this griping, how can fanfic possible help a writer?

Well, as I mentioned, it means something good is going on with your stories. Many of us admit to being or starting writing fanfic to hone our skills, just like as budding artists we may draw from other people’s drawings to practice until we develop our own style. N0w, you could go after the fanfic writers and demand they take anything down. You can legally chase them down if they are making money from anything they write based on your stories. You could allow them to keep it up as long as they add a disclaimer that their story is not written by the author and is by no means sanctioned or related to the canon of the stories from which they draw the characters and world.

Or… you could require that they add the disclaimer and add a link to your website, so that you get traffic drawn to your sites and make sales from interested readers who want to know what the real characters and world is like. They may prefer yours, they may not, but you can’t shape readers to like you, you can only try to connect with readers who like what you do.

Now, if you’re reading this EA Games / Clive Barker / Developers of Undying–I have an idea for you that I would love to flesh out as a story for a sequel to that amazing game…You know, so it wouldn’t actually be fan fiction, but work from a “published” author…

*If you aren’t writing about things you love then you are writing dreck just to feed your wallet and probably hate what you do so much that you contemplate slitting your wrists at least once a day because in order to keep making money, you have to sell them what they want instead of what you want. And the work suffers for it too–readers can tell when your heart isn’t in it.

**WARNING: Read no further if you want to keep your brain clean. K/S is where the “slash” came from, as in Kirk slash Spock, as in “Kirk and Spock in a homosexual love affair”. The popular Highlander series had the same thing happen to it, where fanfic had the main character – usually the female author vaguely disguised – trying to convince the show’s main characters that they were in fact gay and should be lovers. And that is barely scratching the surface.